The Case for Ethical Warning Labels on Animal Products

Thomas WellsABC Religion and Ethics
7 Jan 2014

The animal products industry has adapted to society's changing views. Secluding livestock and their slaughter undermines our ability to choose what we eat in a way consistent with our moral beliefs.
Credit: shutterstock.com

Like cigarettes, meat and dairy packaging should include no nonsense factual warnings about the negative consequences of one's consumption choices.

Just as with cigarettes, exercising our sovereign right to free choice requires that we be adequately informed about the significant negative implications of our choices by someone other than the manufacturer that wants us to buy their product. In this case, the significant consequences relate to living up to one's ethical values rather than safe-guarding one's prudential interests in long-term health. But the principle is the same.

Ethical warning labels would inform consumers of the physical and mental suffering involved in producing the animal products they are considering buying. I envisage labels like this:

This chicken's beak was cut off, causing it intense pain until its death

and:

This cow's calves were taken away and killed to keep it producing milk.

Servers of cooked animal products, from lowly hot-dog stands to the fanciest restaurants, would also have to include these ethical warnings prominently on their menus.

Like cigarette packaging in some countries, the ethical warnings might include full colour pictures of the living conditions of the animals your food comes from. The labels could be graded to reflect the conditions under which the source animals lived and died - for example, if they pass the requirements of the various animal welfare certification programmes. That would allow better but more expensive standards of animal welfare to be recognised and encouraged by consumers. Many restaurants might prefer to pay more for their groceries merely to avoid having pictures of debeaked hens ruining the aesthetic of their menus.

Still there are limits to how positive such labels may get. Even an animal that lives quite well and is killed quite painlessly has still had its life treated as a commodity, and this should be acknowledged. For example:

This chicken was killed at 7 weeks of age. It could have lived up to 7 years.

My proposal may seem outrageous and paternalistic on first reading. But it seems to me that such ethical warning labels are not only permissible in a free society; they are actually required by the liberal conception of freedom.

A liberal society is defined by its respect for individuals' free choices in their private personal domain. First, whatever is not illegal is permitted. Second, making some practice illegal in the first place requires a public justification for its necessity and legitimacy that even those affected can appreciate. John Stuart Mill's "harm principle" provides an ideal benchmark for this. It is legitimate to ban behaviour that harms others and their freedom to live their own life, but it is illegitimate to ban behaviour that merely offends others - even if they are the "moral majority" - by going against their private moral beliefs. Thus, in a liberal society, people are free to decide for themselves whether to do things that others strongly disapprove of, such as following "weird" religions, or engaging in unorthodox sexual practices, or eating meat.

Ethical warning labels would need to be mandated by law. But they would not restrict people's freedom of choice because consumers would remain as free as before to buy those products. Indeed, they respect the "democratic" mainstream view of meat-eating as a private ethical concern about which individuals should make up their own minds, on the model of a consumer lifestyle choice.

Of course, ethical labelling would interfere with the freedom of manufacturers to present their products as they wish, and would therefore need to pass a public justification relating to that. But this is not a great challenge. Corporations are not persons (whatever the Roberts Supreme Court says) and so their freedom of expression does not deserve intrinsic respect and can be abridged on purely utilitarian grounds. Labelling laws are consistent with the liberal understanding of individual rights and hence permissible in a liberal society.

Indeed, most countries already have labelling laws compelling manufacturers to present certain kinds of information (like use by dates) in a clear way, and these are often justified by customers' interest in having easily comparable information available in their decision-making (like information about nutritional values on packaged food and restaurant menus). Nor need such labelling laws relate to scientifically proven "medical" facts, as the campaign for GM labelling demonstrates. Nor need they only reflect the interests of the majority of the population, as warnings that products may contain nuts demonstrate. Justifying an ethical labelling law merely requires showing that it could significantly help people to make better decisions.

This brings me to why I think ethical labelling is actually required by liberalism. The idea that the free choices of sovereign individuals are trumps contains a complication. What counts as a free choice? One can't tell merely from the fact that someone chose X over Y (an outcome) that their choice was a free one (a procedural quality).

Let us leave aside the "free will" challenge and adopt the liberal starting point that individuals are indeed more or less sovereign agents who are responsible for their moral character and can therefore make choices for themselves. Nonetheless, there remains a question mark over whether particular choices that we make are really free in the sense of being our own. In particular, if we are not sufficiently informed about both the negative and positive implications of the options we are presented with, we won't be able to relate those options to our own values and interests. We can still perform acts of choosing in such cases - we still have the power of choice. But we would not be choosing freely because we would not be able to exercise our right to choose in a way that follows from the personal moral beliefs that make us, us.

This issue seems particularly problematic in consumer choice cases where two factors are present:

First, where the negative consequences of consuming something seem very significant and thus have a prima facie call on the attention of the chooser.

Second, where the manufacturer of a product has a strong interest in encouraging its consumption even at the expense of the customer's own interests, and has substantial power to misrepresent the product to the consumer in a way that undermines their ability to consider its negative consequences.

These factors were clearly present in the case of cigarettes, a poisonous product designed to be addictive and routinely advertised in a deceptive way. I believe they are also present in the case of animal products.

Killing or hurting animals is increasingly alien to our modern values and sensibilities. We don't gather anymore in the public square to enjoy the entertainment of cats being set on fire. Indeed, pets and working animals enjoy a variety of legal protections against mistreatment or even mere neglect that would have seemed astonishing 150 years ago. News items about incidents of animal cruelty, like dogfighting rings, generate widespread public outrage and disgust. Animal welfare seems to matter a great deal to many of us. Yet, while the strength of this social consensus against inflicting suffering on animals is a fact, it is also a fact that a great many of us continue to consume meat and dairy produced by an industrial factory system that, in the name of efficiency, inflicts far more suffering on each individual animal than 150 years ago.

There are two possible solutions to this puzzle. First, that we just hold inconsistent moral views - that is, the majority of us have freely decided that some animals in some domains deserve special protections (the ones in our homes, and public spaces like zoos), and also that "food animals" don't. The animal rights movement has tended to focus on this moral inconsistency as a problem of moral irrationality. Thus, moral philosophers like Peter Singer argue that meat-eaters should modify their moral views and beliefs by affirming the moral status of animal welfare in all domains.

The second alternative is that something external to ourselves may be preventing us from acting consistently by applying the strong moral views we have developed about the treatment of animals to the animal products industry. In this perspective, the problem is not that our moral reasoning has gone awry, but that our freedom to make ethical choices of our own has been infringed. This consumer sovereignty perspective is the basis for my proposal for ethical labelling.

The animal products industry has adapted to society's changing moral views about animals as well as to the technological possibilities of factory farming. Noting that most of us cannot bear to see animals suffer, they have endeavoured to seclude livestock and their slaughter from our gaze. When we go to a supermarket or restaurant we are presented with meat rather than with animals, and with deliciousness rather than with killing. This is an obviously one-sided and deliberately deceptive presentation of the basic ethical facts about animal products that have a prima facie call on our attention. It undermines our ability to choose what we eat in a way that is consistent with our moral beliefs about the treatment of animals. Ethical warning labels would allow people to make better informed and therefore freer choices by breaking open the controlled and biased information environment created by the animal products industry.

Some will argue that ethical labels would be coercive and thus undermine free choice. There are at least two routes to this conclusion which I will consider in turn. First, the idea that such labels are designed to be emotionally manipulative and this actually undermines people's ability to make a rational choice.

The problem with this critique is that emotions are an indispensable part of our moral reasoning. Indeed, the core ethical argument against eating animals developed by the modern animal rights movement associated with Peter Singer is that animal suffering is of the same kind as human suffering. His argument is a call for empathy across the artificial boundaries which restrict us from imagining and taking seriously the suffering of others. This is rather different from mere sentimentalism. It seems to me that truthful ethical warning labels merely suggest that act of imagination rather than enforce it.

In addition, one must acknowledge that the emotional manipulation argument goes both ways. Advertisers and restaurants produce sophisticated "food porn" that artificially inflates our lust for meat, and manufacturers tweak recipes to manipulate our sense of the deliciousness of animal products. If their emotional manipulation is permissible, surely turn about is fair play.

Most people by now have some understanding of the fact that the way livestock animals are kept is rather horrible, but in the moment when we make our consumption decisions this rather abstract knowledge must go head to head with the full sensory propaganda of companies that are only interested in making us buy as much of their products as possible. Just as with cigarettes, there is a strong case for presenting the negative side of the case at the moment of purchase just as forcefully as the positive case is now presented.

Second, it may be argued that there is an inconsistency between the public justification for such labelling laws (enhancing freedom of choice) and the motivations of those who would support them (to induce people to reduce their consumption of animal products). The model here might be the introduction in some American states of laws requiring that women seeking an abortion first watch an ultrasound of their foetus. The Republican legislators behind these laws give a public justification for this kind of law in terms of supporting women's freedom of choice, but their actual motivations are, rather obviously, to reduce the number of abortions women have, in line with their private religiously based moral views that abortion is killing if not murder. Likewise, although ethical labelling laws can be given a superficial justification in terms of free choice, they are really about a minority group (animal rights fundamentalists) seeking to impose their own moral views onto society as a whole in an indirect and illegitimate way.

This kind of partisanship is disappointing. Democracy should aspire to more than the kind of tribalism that rejects proposals merely because they come from the wrong party. Proper public reasoning requires focusing on the quality of the public justification for policies like ethical warning laws rather than ad hominem suspicion of the motives of people that support them. Objectors must show one of three things: that the concept of ethical labelling is inconsistent with a free choice model (principle clash); or else that it is likely to undermine it in the longer term (bad consequences); or else that, as in the case of abortion perhaps, the free choice model is itself inadequate (wrong theory).

Yes, the consequence of mandating ethical warning labels on animal products would likely be a dramatic reduction in their consumption, and this is certainly what many supporters of such a law would like to see. But this no more counts as evidence of coercion than the fact that a university education correlates with liberal political views and lower religiosity proves that universities are a conspiracy against the Republican Party. Evidence that people change their minds is not necessarily evidence that their minds have been changed for them. Indeed, supporters of ethical warnings can fairly claim that they do not impose contentious moral views on other people, but only help people to better live up to their own existing moral views if they wish to do so.

Many meat eaters justify their lifestyle by reference to their ability and right to make their own free choices. But if they are already making a free and fully informed choice that follows from an ethical value system which rates the moral status of animals simply as "delicious," then it hardly seems that providing factual information about the suffering of livestock animals could affect their consumption behaviour. (Here they resemble smokers who genuinely don't care about living past 70.) Because these meat eaters are already choosing freely - according to their personal moral beliefs - labelling laws could not affect them.

Those meat eaters who would be affected by labels would be those who already suspect that their practice is morally wrong for them - that is, inconsistent with their own personal moral beliefs about how animals should be treated - but prefer to evade being confronted with that fact or find it hard to resist temptation in the moment of decision. (Here they resemble smokers who don't want to acknowledge that tobacco causes cancer.) Ethical warning labels provide information at the right time and place to help such people live up to their own moral beliefs, but do not force them to. The burden of proof is on objectors to explain why this should be seen as suppressing rather than as supporting their freedom of choice.

lawrence pope :

30 Jan 2014 11:43:07am

It's hard to see how any person would be disadvantaged by Wells' proposal and it appears to support the facilitation of good faith.

Vehicle safety ratings have become a normal part of purchasing selection it doesn't seem unreasonable to have labelling that gives the product purchaser a clearer idea about the real world consequences of their product choices.

In my experience many people are unaware that calves are taken from their mothers and killed as a normative feature of the milk production industry. Many other examples could be given that, sensitively disclosed by labelling, would empower consumers to make choices consistent with their own moral standards rather than being misled by advertising or `unpleasant facts` concealment by omission.

Lynette Chen :

27 Jan 2014 5:10:50pm

This is a excellent idea. The powerful "food" lobby would definitely oppose it and I'm sure they would be successful. Ever so slowly, too slowly, people are beginning to question how their food is produced. Cruelty on such a massive scale is almost incomprehensible.

Awake :

16 Jan 2014 1:24:38am

Coloru has made it pretty clear that there is something in this argument that has struck a chord. Otherwise, I don't think so much time would have been taken in making a response. Keep on keeping on! So excited to see we so many are preferring to wake, even if that waking is to a pretty harsh reality. Thank you for this carefully thought out statement I'm sure you know that people will attempt to poke holes in the "argument" because they stand to lose much in their own minds. When in reality we all, the planet, and the other animals on it, stand to gain so much from this shift in consciousness.

Mark :

14 Jan 2014 12:03:15am

A proposed warning by Mr Wells. "This chicken was killed at 7 weeks of age. It could have lived up to 7 years." Does Mr Wells really believe that consumers think that chickens die of old age before they are processed and sold?

We all consume other living things to survive. We all justify our right to kill those living things. How we justify them and what we consider to unethical or distasteful depends on what we eat, be it omnivores, vegetarians, vegans or even fruitarians.

What is the next logical step in these ethical warnings? "This potato could have sprouted, had a full potato plant lifespan and had a family (baby potatoes)." or perhaps even "If mow your lawn, you will multilate the grass." Using Mr Wells' logic, these warnings would be "supporting their freedom of choice" in knowing these facts.

I know a person (a fruitarian) who won't eat food like a carrot for ethical reasons, because it would kil the plant. This is his ethical position and he is entitled to it, no matter how whacky I think it is. However, imagine if he was writing Mr Wells' ethical warnings.

Juliet :

coloru :

unfortunately Thomas your premise for comparison between cigarette smoking and meat consumption is a little confused. You have tied them together with reference to 'negative consequences'.

Negative consequences is a subjective term and not the reason for cigarette package warnings. These are health warnings, not ethical standard warnings. They are informing the consumer of direct health impacts to that consumer. This may or may not be ethical but that is irrelevant. The majority of the population support this tobacco information display because they do not want to pay socially and financially for the dangerous habits of others. These warnings are essentially financially driven.

Cutting off the beak of a chick does not harm the consumer or the wider community - only if this practice offends an individual on the basis of some personal dogmatic belief (like a view from religion or some other arbitrary source).

Using your logic, we could take your argument further and you could expect to have warnings on iPhone packages saying "This product was manufactured by child slave labour in China" or for the Greenies on a carton of printer paper, "This product was manufactured by cutting down pristine rainforest in Tasmania". Or what about the packaging on a girl's bikini, "This product may offend Mohammed".

Your heart might be in the right place however blaming and guilt-tripping the consumer for what you see as ethical reasons is not a suitable approach. Business has no moral or ethical responsibility and I agree that it's up to government to bound certain activities and powers in the interests of the broader community. However, as you stated in your reference to Mills, it is not legitimate for legislation to be based on moral belief.

I happen to like eating chicken. I don't generally buy chicken and if I do it's from my organic butcher. My preference is to eat my own chickens that I have bred and I am more than happy to cut their heads off and prepare them myself. The thing I find hard to swallow is the logic around the animal rights activist who doesn't eat meat because it's wrong to kill or use animals as a commodity and yet insects or bacteria is fair game. Every time I wash my hands I am flushing life down the drain.

Death and pain are a part of life - everyone will die and many of us will die in a painful, torturous way - why shouldn't we? We are all perpetrators and victims in this world of evolution and to be otherwise is to deny the very existence of oneself.

I don't like hurting animals or people however I respect that my sustaining of life requires a respective acquisition of life and energy and that the earth will not be untainted by my existence. The very opposite. I will leave my footprint in what will be the rather short time that our species has on this earth. My concern for animal welfare is purely the result of my subtle and pow

Ghoti :

Negative consequence is not a subjective term, it is completely objective; what you have done is to add a qualifier that the original author was specifically arguing against.

A negative consequence is undoubtedly felt by a cow from which a young calf is taken. I know from personal experience, having listened many times to cattle suffering that loss. You can't miss it, living next door to a cowshed.

But even if that is to miss your own argument, A person is likely harmed if their actions result in a compromise to their moral values. This is not the same as the physical harm done by ingesting toxins, but cannot and should not be discounted altogether.

And as for business having no moral responsibility: would you say that a person has no moral responsibility? The two are analogous; in law we speak of natural persons to distinguish them from legal persons who include businesses as well as individuals.

As for the commodity view of animals, I suspect that sentience is a relevant concept. Bacteria are not sentient, and nor, probably, are insects. Fish? Who knows? Mammals? Certainly.

It is a pity that you missed the argument, since your ethics (at least as espoused) seem to lack for little.

Wuluwoof :

13 Jan 2014 5:48:15pm

Firstly: warnings on cigarette packets are not only financially driven; selling products that may cause people to die painful deaths is partly a moral issue, and warnings against buying them are thus at least partly driven by moral considerations. Similarly, getting rid of the slave trade had everything to do with moral considerations, as did outlawing child labour in Western countries. No business is above what the public considers moral, as former agricultural minister Joe Ludwig pointed out after the Four Corners/Indonesia live exports debacle of a few years ago.

Secondly: I see nothing wrong with informing consumers about the link between child labour and your iPhone, or printing paper and Tasmanian forests. To argue that such warnings are similar to warnings that particular attire might offend the prophet Mohammed, is illogical. The belief that a dead man lives on and can be offended, lives in the realms of fantasy. Destroying forests and exploitation of children, on the other hand, are real. It is right that consumers should know if they are supporting such practices.

Finally: death and pain are indeed part of life, but the history of humanity is party the history of trying to avoid causing others to die in tortuous ways. We used to exclude animals from such concerns because we refused to accept that their physiology is similar to ours in ways that cause them to suffer fear and pain in much the way that we do. To the best of our present knowledge, bacteria do not. And even if they did, arguing that we may as well treat mammals cruelly because bacteria and insects also suffer, makes no logical sense. You might as well argue that since the world is never going to be perfect, we may as well stop trying to improve it at all.

Jo Connellan :

13 Jan 2014 7:11:32pm

Warnings on animal products, apart from the ethical aspect, are also health warnings. Much of the health issues in developed countries is over consumption of animal products - if everyone in developed countries reduced their animal product consumption by half, the health improvements would be significant. And just as we all benefit if we encourage less people to smoke, so we would all benefit if we encouraged people to eat more plant based food and less meat.

Death and pain are indeed part of life, but that doesn't mean we have no responsibility to avoid or minimise that to the best of our ability. For meat eaters, that means you should,be ensuring - maybe via labels - that what you are eating had a good life and a quick, painless death. For others of us, a healthy diet without a animals is preferred.

I agree with the main argument that consumers not only should know about the life and death of the animal they are consuming, and that in that knowledge, I am confident people would generally respond accordingly.

Rebekah :

13 Jan 2014 7:42:32pm

” Death and pain are a part of life - everyone will die and many of us will die in a painful, torturous way -why shouldn't we?”

Seriously? Why shouldn't we us because we are evolving and drawing closer to the truth of our existence, that none should have to suffer due to the evil nature of mans heart. To believe that we are separate, from God, from each other, and to acknowledge that living a life of pain or inflicting pain is terrible and wrong. We are finally waking up, to the truth, or at least, some of us.

Caroline Pallett :

14 Jan 2014 9:57:44am

If people were aware of the suffering that happens on a day-to-day basis to bring food to our plates, I believe most would not eat meat. There ia a reason why animals are slaughtered behind closed doors - the industry is very well aware that as the human race becomes more civilised, it has less and less appetite for unnecessary suffering and this should be highlighted and respected.

There is no doubt that eating meat is unnecessary because all scientific and medical research states quite clearly that humans live longer and are healthier if they do not eat it. The livestock industry causes more than double the amount of global warming than the automobile industry. When people complain that their right to choose is being compromised, they are forgetting a third party, who suffers just as we do, feels terror, just as we do and wants to live out its life, just as we do. But as with slavery, the victims have no voice, have no rights and are judged therefore to be fair game for any horror we choose to inflict upon them.

anonymoose :

16 Jan 2014 12:01:26pm

I agree with your comment for the most point. To force warning labels on society when information is freely available already does not make a lot of sense.

As far as animal rights activists not eating meat or consuming dairy being difficult to swallow for you, that's a bit different. We eat plants when they are organisms too. The main difference being that a plant is not a complex organism with a nervous system and conscious thought, therefore just exists rather than having an appreciation for life. This can also be said for single celled organisms, such as the bacteria we wash off our hands. Also the difference between choosing not to kill animals for a tasty meal because we have a perfectly viable and healthy alternative verse killing single celled organisms to avoid being sick is comparative to shooting a tiger for sport verse shooting a tiger that has seen you and is about to rip your head off. It's the unnecessary and often cruel slaughter of complex life forms with an appreciation of being alive that we find difficult to stomach.

I'd like to ad that you slaughtering your own chickens rather than buying them from a coles or woolworths is admirable.

Sir Vomatron :

I agree with the sentiment, perhaps the graphic nature of labelling could be toned down though :-)

There is value in providing ethical information on packaging of animal products. It's something consumers already have to some degree, and there is a definite consumer 'want' for this information.

Eggs, for example, are labelled as cage, barn laid or free range. It is up to the consumer to do their own research on what this actually means, but it does allow the consumer the option of an ethical purchase. And with the high level of cage egg purchases, I don't think too many consumers are particularly bothered with the ethics of where the eggs came from. For some it's about the price point, and who offers the cheapest product. For me, it's about how the chicken is raised & cared for - I'll spend an extra $2 so Little Red Hen can flap about flippantly in the sunshine.

The same can be said for bacon. Coles now advertise 'sow free stalls'. What does that actually mean - are the pigs still factory raised? Yes. The average consumer may not make this connection though, so it is an offer of false ethics (not false advertising). Again in this situation it is up to the consumer to do their own research to determine what 'sow stall free' might actually mean. In some people's minds they picture pigs roaming the pastures, oinking, having a grand old time. This is what they think they are purchasing. The reality is that by advertising 'sow stall free bacon', what you are really saying is that the pig may have been raised indoors and never seen direct sunlight. It may have been raised in a small, confined space without much room to move. But it certainly wasn't put in a sow stall when it had a litter of piglets. This should be more in line with the egg carton labelling - cage, barn or free range?

Given so many brands choose to advertise their products with an ethical label (organic, free-range, sow-stall free etc), and there is consumer demand for it, I agree that this kind of labelling should exist - it should be standardised, with clear and concise rules, so consumers can better understand their purchases and ensure purchases are in line with their own ethical standards.

I don't think the messaging needs ot be graphic, but consumers want, and should get, ethical labelling on their animal product purchases to ensure they are able to purchase a product that meets their ethical requirements.

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